Touring

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As tens of thousands of fans arrived at ­Toronto’s Rogers Stadium on Aug. 24, their bucket hats — worn in homage to the night’s headliner, Oasis — protected them from the sun that hung above in the azure sky. The atmosphere at this, the band’s first North American show of its zeitgeist-­shaking reunion tour, was convivial, communal, basically euphoric.

But inside the venue, Arthur Fogel sat in front of a weather radar and watched as a storm approached. The meteorologists gathered around him offered guidance: “It’s moving at this speed. It has lightning in it. If it gets this close to the stadium, everyone inside has to go.”

“So you’re sitting there and you’re stressing,” Fogel says. “Like, ‘Aw, f–k. They’re saying it’s going to come right over the top of the place.’ ”

Navigating dilemmas — at times as uncontrollable as the weather — has been part of Fogel’s repertoire for roughly four decades, as he has helped guide some of the biggest musical superstars in history through major, and majorly lucrative, world tours.

Arthur Fogel will be recognized as Touring Executive of the Year at Billboard‘s Live Music Summit, held Nov. 3 in Los Angeles. For tickets and more information, click here.

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On a September afternoon in his sprawling corner office at the Live Nation headquarters in Beverly Hills, his success is tangible. There’s a yet-to-be-hung plaque celebrating Beyoncé’s six sold-out shows at the United Kingdom’s Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, a June run that earned $61.6 million and sold 275,000 tickets, according to Billboard Boxscore. There are plaques for similarly massive achievements by Coldplay, U2, Madonna. An image of David Bowie commanding a stage during his 1990 Sound+Vision Tour hangs over the room’s sitting area, where Fogel sinks into the couch in his office attire of black cargo pants and a black hoodie.

As Live Nation’s chairman of global music/president of global touring, Fogel has helped these and other greats tour the world in a global market he has seen quadruple in size during his decades in the business. This year, Oasis, Lady Gaga and Beyoncé worked with Fogel to put on, respectively, the aforementioned reunion tour, the opera-themed Mayhem Ball and the country-centric Cowboy Carter spectacular — runs that collectively tallied 160 shows in 19 countries. Coldplay just performed 10 shows at Wembley Stadium, the longest consecutive run ever by an act at the venue, while 1.6 million people gathered on the beach in Rio de Janeiro to see Madonna play a free show in May 2024, a site Lady Gaga drew 2.5 million fans to a year later.

Successfully executing such epic concert endeavors has earned Fogel the trust of icons, a place in the Canadian Music History Hall of Fame and even his own documentary, 2013’s Who the F**k Is Arthur Fogel?, in which his client and friend Bono helps answer the titular question by explaining that artists like Fogel because “he’s calm.” It’s the kind of even temper that, for example, might help one navigate something like a freak thunderstorm hurtling toward a stadium full of rock fans.

“Even though inside I might be tied in knots, I think part of how you lead is to stay calm,” Fogel says. “Being calm is part of what people look to you for in tough situations.”

Today in his office, Fogel is soft-spoken but talkative, and one gets a sense of the steady presence that has helped him develop professional relationships that also transcend business, a goal since his early days in the Toronto rock scene. “The live business is very transactional, but in those early years as a musician and then working with artists as a tour manager, I knew I was looking for a different sort of relationship,” he says.

He instead sought “the anti-transactional. It was like, ‘How do I develop long-term relationships where I’m providing a service and an understanding, and I’m able to converse with artists about different aspects of their career, and certainly about touring, on a global basis?’ That became my fixation because it was, and to some degree still is, the great differentiator in my career — that global perspective.”

Arthur Fogel

Joel Barhamand

To go global, however, one must still start local. Born and raised in Ottawa, Ontario, Fogel relocated to Toronto as a young adult and began playing drums in various bands before realizing, he says with a chuckle, “that if I wanted to get to a certain place in life, it wasn’t going to be as a musician.” He became the night manager of Toronto club The Edge, then started tour-managing a band that played there, Martha and the Muffins. Fogel was then hired at Concert Productions International by Michael Cohl, the touring impresario and eventual chairman of Live Nation. He was named president of the concert division of Cohl’s Toronto-based company in 1986.

“Michael Cohl had the same view on global business,” says Fogel, who worked with Cohl to book The Rolling Stones’ 1989 Steel Wheels tour, a gargantuan 115-show, 19-country run “that really helped develop my understanding and expertise of putting together a major tour on a broad basis.” Bowie’s 1990 Sound+Vision Tour followed as Fogel settled into a long tenure at CPI. As the live sector consolidated in the late ’90s and early 2000s, Fogel and Cohl’s subsequent company, The Next Adventure, was acquired by SFX, where Fogel stayed as it merged with Clear Channel Entertainment and that company eventually spun off its concerts division as Live Nation in 2005. Fogel, who started working with U2 in 1997, Madonna in 2001 and Sting in 2004, became Live Nation’s president of global touring in 2005. Beyoncé became a client in 2012; she and the rest of these icons — apart from Bowie, who stopped touring in 2004 and died in 2016 — remain Fogel’s clients to this day.

“Arthur has always been a visionary, and we value his expertise in touring,” U2’s The Edge says. “Over many years working with him, we have come to depend on his great counsel. Our tours would not have been the same without him. Beyond that, he’s a fantastic person and he has become a dear friend as well.”

When Fogel started out, he says there were roughly 20 countries artists could tour. Now “there’s probably 70 or 80. Over the last 20 years, globalization has expanded pretty much everywhere, except maybe the heart of Africa.” This quadrupling of the market is “probably the most significant shift in the last 20 years… Artists are able to touch their fans everywhere in the world and generate an income everywhere in the world.” The success of Bad Bunny, he adds, demonstrates how touring has not only opened geographically, but genrewise. “I find that particularly gratifying,” Fogel says.

Certainly, the kind of shows he tends to put on — Beyoncé flying through the air on a mechanical horse, Gaga in a chessboard dance-off with her past self, U2 playing under the cosmic glow of Las Vegas’ Sphere when it performed the venue’s opening residency in 2023 — help foster this global fascination. While putting a band onstage with a few lights “can and certainly does” work, Fogel says, “I like big; I like wow; I like the spectacle.”

He has had no shortage of wow this year. Gaga’s tour behind her new album, MAYHEM, started in April at Coachella, where Fogel was in the audience for the show’s stunning debut. (While he “sort of had a sense of what was coming together, you never really know until you see and hear it, and it was awesome.”) Fogel and Gaga, who’ve worked together since the early days of her career, debated putting the Mayhem Ball in arenas versus stadiums, ultimately deciding that its 87 dates would primarily be held in arenas.

“The last tour, for [2020’s] Chromatica, was in stadiums, and my feeling was that she should go back into arenas for multiple nights everywhere to reconnect with her fans in a different way,” Fogel says. “This show is unbelievable in arenas; it’s so powerful and so well done. She’s an amazing talent, really is.”

“Arthur has been by my side through some of the most defining moments of my touring career,” Gaga says. “His vision, dedication and heart for the live experience have inspired me endlessly. I wouldn’t be the artist I am today without his partnership.”

Arthur Fogel

Joel Barhamand

Meanwhile, Oasis and its team “were quite convinced that stadiums were the way to go” for the band’s first tour in 16 years, Fogel says. “I don’t think there was ever any doubt, certainly in the U.K., about their strength and their ability to sell out stadiums… My gut said it was going to work, but I think everybody was a bit surprised at how big it was.” He notes that the most significant challenge in bringing the reunion to market was simply keeping it a secret for six months before it was announced.

“You’d wake up every day going, ‘Oh, f–k. Did somebody spill the beans?’ Because it was very important to them that it not enter the rumor mill in a serious way.”

Fogel and Beyoncé, meanwhile, decided on a residency structure for Cowboy Carter, where she played multiple nights in nine cities across the United States and Europe. Fogel says he and his clients make such decisions based on how much time a given artist wants to tour and how much of the world they want to reach. “Doing multiple shows in less cities is a model that’s more prevalent now than ever,” he says, “but the flip side is that if you don’t go wide and touch your fans, eventually they kind of move on. You have to find that balance… I don’t think the residency model serves the long-term strategy very well.”

While these particular superstars can reliably play stadiums whenever they want, Fogel says a major development in the business is how stadium dates have opened to artists in earlier stages of their career. In previous eras, “playing stadiums was very rarefied air,” he says. “In the last few years, the volume of stadium shows has continued to increase dramatically, and I don’t see it really slowing down.”

He attributes this development to the sense of community people feel when they’re part of such a major event and to acts being “bigger than ever. The noise about artists and their music [and the culture around it] is so overpowering and motivating to people to want to be a part of it. It’s pretty extraordinary.”

As 2025 draws to a close, Fogel reports that from where he’s sitting — which is, in this moment, still the couch, although he later relocates to his standing desk — “the business is in a great place.”

Still, when your clients are simultaneously putting on several of the world’s biggest tours, things can, and do, get thorny. “There was a period during the summer where Beyoncé was rolling, Oasis started, Gaga was out there, Sting was out there,” Fogel says. “There was a lot of bouncing around, and it was a tough year just physically and mentally with travel. But the flip side is that that’s a one-percenter problem, so you can’t get too dramatic about it.”

This is the even keel that artists love about Fogel, who ultimately watched the Toronto thunderstorm veer south of the stadium, taking the lightning with it and leaving some 39,000 fans joyfully singing “Don’t Look Back in Anger” in a downpour.

“Stuff like that happens. I can give you a million stories where it’s like, ‘What the f–k? How is that happening?’ But it’s part of the game, part of what we do.”

Fogel’s trick is not just staying calm during challenges, but sometimes even enjoying them. “The rain,” he says, “actually added to the vibe of the show.”

This story appears in the Oct. 25, 2025, issue of Billboard.